Since the initial flood, it has been determined that there was indeed no DoS attack – unless you consider skyrocketing popularity driven by TUAW and Digg to be a DoS attack (and it certainly looked like one!).

Server response has somewhat returned to normalcy at this point since the initial 12-hour onrush, though things may be touch-and-go for the next few days as folks continue to download our first MediaFork release.

In other technik news, we have finally been contacted by titer. I will state simply at this point that our discussion went extremely well and everyone will ultimately benefit. More news on this in coming weeks.

I would like to sincerely apologize to our end-users for any inconvenience this afternoon’s site disruptions may have caused. While reaction to our beta release has been extraordinary (both in terms of volume and positive response), our site came under DoS attack around 3:45PM ET this afternoon and has mostly recovered about two hours later.

I have deployed measures to prevent this sort of disruption in the future, including improved memory and process management of Apache threads and rollout of CBand bandwidth limiting/throttling. This does regrettably mean that legitimate users will get a “site busy” message from time to time, but this should only be temporary and site operations will resume normally.

Thank you for your patience and understanding – and interest in MediaFork!

We’re all very excited to get an application out there for the community to stress-test. It is a beta, and we can’t guarantee any particular level of functionality or stability, but we think you’ll enjoy it. Highlights include full 640*480 iPod video, anamorphic encoding, and newer, faster copies of x264 and ffmpeg.

Please visit our forums to report bugs, suggest features, ask questions, or join development. We are also available on IRC.

MediaFork is a GPL’d, multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 ripper/converter, available for Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows. It is based on the source code to HandBrake, written by Eric Petit and Laurent Aimar.

Please stay tuned to this blog, especially graphic designers. We will soon be holding a contest to choose a new icon for MediaFork (Mac OS X and Windows). Prizes will include: a sense of pride in a job well-done, artistic immortality, and a warm feeling of self-satisfaction.

Unfortunately, MediaFork 0.8.0 will bring a formal end to support for the BeOS operating system. Having later morphed into ZETA, BeOS represented a best-in-class desktop system with cutting-edge innovations in its day (and was naturally suited for multimedia applications), but is no longer widely used or supported and is now considered deprecated within the MediaFork […]

To avoid confusion with possible future releases from titer, we have decided on the following:
Our intended 0.7.2 release will be versioned as 0.7.1SE (Special Edition)
It will not contain forward-looking changes as originally intended, but include only basic changes to titer’s 0.7.1 release adding support for iPod 640×480 (firmware 1.2+) output.

Due to unexpected issues with memory management that were introduced with titer’s switch from libmp4v2 to libavformat for muxing post-0.7.1 (subversion revision 60, to be exact), our anticipated release of HandBrake 0.7.2 is being delayed while the problems are sorted out.

Welcome to the new HandBrake development and support site!
It’s been a long time coming, but we’re finally getting closer to having a new public release of HandBrake ready – nearly a year after the last release! This new release, 0.7.2, will feature full support for iPod videos at 640×480 in both MPEG-4 and H.264.